The present disclosure is directed to transaction assessment and/or authentication systems and methods and, more particularly, to systems and methods for assessing and/or authenticating transactions to identify fraudulent payments.
Many payment transaction anti-fraud systems provide a result to the merchant of either                Accepting the transaction        Rejecting the transaction        Manually reviewing the transaction        
The first two results typically result in an automated response to the initiator of the transaction, either an acceptance of the payment or a rejection respectively.
FIG. 9 shows an exemplary payment transaction anti-fraud system 900, of the type that are currently in use. Such systems provide a score as the result of evaluation (910). Similarly, one range of scores would typically result in an automated acceptance (920), with another range resulting in an automated rejection of the payment (930). The transactions in the middle grey area would require further manual review (940).
The evaluation of transactions that are categorized as requiring further manual review is time consuming and error prone. On average in online commerce 20 percent of transactions require manual review. The manual review cost is estimated to be in average more than 50 percent of the overall expenditure in anti-fraud activities. The more this review process can be automated the higher the efficiencies and benefits.
Bitcoin transactions are by definition pseudo-anonymous (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency). This means that fundamentally two users can transfer Bitcoins to each other without revealing the identity of either of them. Instead the transaction is cryptographically signed to ensure that the transaction took place, and there is a public record of such transaction that can be verified by all players on the Bitcoin infrastructure.
If either of these users wanted to exchange their Bitcoins to FIAT currency (or FIAT money) they would have to use a Bitcoin Exchange or a Bitcoin Wallet-hosting company that enables exchanging Bitcoins into FIAT currency.
In the United States, and other countries, governmental bodies regulate this exchange. In these countries, Bitcoin Exchanges are required by law to capture information about the users, usually encompassed within an activity known as “Know your Customer” or KYC. Furthermore organizations/individuals that enable exchanging Bitcoins for FIAT currency, and vice versa are also required to monitor “financial” transactions for potential money laundering activity. Problems arising out of this new cryptocurrency technology operating over a global computer network include challenges of auditing the exchanging of Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies into one another and also into (or between) so-called FIAT money or FIAT currency (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money) and vice versa for compliance with anti-money laundering and suspicious activity, such as fraud.
Typically, merchants involved with fraud try to create new identities rather quickly, to shake off known bad reputations. By discovering connections or relationships, or even multiplicities of entities, locations, or other objects and relationships or connections between new, apparently clean merchants, and existing ones, fraudulent activities on the merchant side can be detected early on.